Restart is used to reflect change in OS setting. When the OS is Windows (registered trademark), restart is required to change the registry contents and to reflect the change. Further, when it is difficult to identify the reason of a fault that has occurred in the system, restart is often employed as a measure to quickly restore the system. Thus, restart is used frequently during operation of the system, and hence there has been a demand to speed up the restart processing for minimizing the downtime of the system.
There is known, as an example of conventional techniques to realize the speed up of the restart processing, a rapid restart method for an information processing apparatus described in page 7 and FIG. 1 of Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. H11-24936. FIG. 1 shows configuration of this conventional information processing apparatus. As shown FIG. 1, the conventional information processing apparatus 1 has a main memory device 11 arranged therein, and an input/output device 2 arranged externally. The main memory device 11 has, arranged therein, an OS program area 111 to load an operating system (hereafter, referred to as the “OS”), an initialization data area 112, non-initialization data area 113, and an initialization data save area 114. The information processing apparatus further has, in the interior thereof other than the main memory device 11, restart commencement unit 12, rapid restart designation unit 13, execution control unit 14, initialization data saving unit 15, initialization data restoration unit 16, input/output device halting unit 17, and OS loading unit 18.
In this conventional information processing apparatus 1, OS initialization data is saved into the initialization data save area 114 by the initialization data saving unit 15 at the startup of the OS. When rapid restart is designated by the rapid restart designation unit 13, the execution control unit 14 transfers execution to an execution start address of the OS program, and the initialization data restoration unit 16 restores initialization data. The rapid restart method provided by the prior art rapidly restarts the information processing apparatus by performing the foregoing processing, without reloading the OS program or data.
It is true that rapid restart of the OS can be realized by the conventional rapid restart method described in the above-mentioned patent publication, but this patent publication does not refer at all to an application program (hereinafter may be shortened to “application”) which is executed on the OS. The application must be terminated normally or forcibly when restarting the OS. If the application is forcibly terminated to shorten the restart time, normal operation of the application after the restart cannot be guaranteed. This is because the current service state is not stored when the application is forcibly terminated. Some application requires, upon restart, the state of service when it was operated. In such case, normal operation of the application after the restart cannot be guaranteed. Therefore, the application must be terminated normally. However, the normal termination of the application involves frequent access to an auxiliary storage device with a low processing speed such as a disk, in order to store the current service state. Such frequent access to the auxiliary storage device increases the system termination processing time, which in turn increases the system restart time.
Additionally, the following cases are envisaged as matters to be considered when using restart. Restart is principally used to reflect the system settings to the OS, or when normal operation of the OS is inhibited due to a fault in the application. In a server which provides a service using a plurality of applications, the OS must be restarted if the normal operation of the OS is disabled due to a fault occurring in one of the plurality of applications. In this case, but only the failed application but also all other applications must be terminated, and an application which is midway through its service is obliged to forcibly interrupt the service.
In order to overcome the problems described above, it is an object of the present invention to provide a rapid restart method, and an information processing apparatus and program, capable of rapidly restarting the system by minimizing the processing to be performed at shutdown.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a rapid restart method, and an information processing apparatus and program, which enable continued operation of applications after restart.